After long court battle, Kafka works unveiled

JERUSALEM — After a lengthy legal saga, Israel’s National Library unveiled on Wednesday a batch of personal letters, illustrations, diaries and handwritten manuscripts previously unseen by the public belonging to famed German language author Franz Kafka.

The papers arrived from a Swiss bank two weeks ago with roughly 100 other artifacts. The released materials are the final unseen portion of a collection inherited by Max Brod, Kafka’s longtime friend and editor, and the publication marks the end of an 11year battle in court.

Although the collection does not include substantial unpublished work by Kafka, researchers believe that it will help shed light on the life and thinking of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

“We are very happy for this moment, finally, after almost 12 years of legal proceedings, many travels and treasure hunts, to bring Max Brod’s estate with papers of Franz Kafka to Jerusalem,” said Oren Weinberg, director of Israel’s National Library.

Kafka, a Germanspeaking Jew from Prague, was a littleknown writer when he died of tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40. Shortly before his death, Kafka bequeathed his writings to Max Brod, his longtime friend, editor and publisher, instructing him to burn it all unread.

Against Kafka’s wishes, Brod published most of the writings in his possession, turning Kafka posthumously into a literary sensation. Kafka, best known for his works “The Metamorphosis,” “The Trial” and “The Castle,” is famous for pinning everyday protagonists against absurd and mysterious situations and authorities.

Brod smuggled some of Kafka’s works to prestate Israel when he fled the Nazis in 1938 and passed some of his collection to Israeli public archives. The rest of his archive was inherited by his secretary, Esther Hoffe. Brod requested that Hoffe pass on the remaining works to an academic institution.

Instead, for the following four decades Hoffe kept the collection in her catfilled apartment in Tel Aviv, and in banks in Switzerland and Israel. She also sold some of the items for hefty sums.

When Hoffe died in 2008 at age 101, the cache was passed down to her two daughters who considered Brod a father figure and his archive their rightful inheritance. The hearing in a Tel Aviv court over the inheritance caught the attention of Meir Heller, legal counsel for Israel’s National Library, and set in motion a legal battle over the collection.

Heller argued that Brod had requested that the collection be passed on to the National Library, and that Kafka’s writings are a “cultural asset” to Israel. The legal fight eventually reached Israel’s Supreme Court, which sided with the library.